


devour all, devour all

by mizael



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: AkaKuro White Day 2017, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Deconstruction, Kindred Spirits, M/M, Supernatural Elements, Underworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-03-14
Packaged: 2018-10-05 05:09:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10298231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mizael/pseuds/mizael
Summary: One summer day, Akashi Seijuurou happens upon Kuroko Tetsuya, across a stream.Pomegranates, for December.He can never leave the Underworld now, bound by the food that resides in his stomach and disperses into his veins.





	

**Author's Note:**

> SCREAMS LOUDLY DO YOU EVER REGRET SOMETHING IN YOUR LIFE  
>  i cant believe this is 8000 words please e n d m e
> 
> happy white day to el-disturbance!! since you were my kuroko for valentines, this is now my gift back to you! written for the akakuro valentines/white day 2017  
>  a fantasy au, or, my excuse to finally write that hades/persephone au of my dreams

**i: your spirit is sweet**

There is nothing that loves Kuroko Tetsuya more than the trees of a forest, the flowers that grow in the meadows preceding them, the summer sun that shines brightly so but dimmed enough to warm rather than to scorch. His little feet run around perfectly trimmed grass blades and not a single one of them hurt his heels, his skin, not even mud sticks to his soles. Kuroko Tetsuya leans down and kisses every breath of nature with his small mouth and wide eyes.

His mother watches him from a distance when he plays on the earth, watches how every living being raises and shakes like an animal on display, waiting to be praised. And Tetsuya, sweet little Tetsuya, will praise them where they are due, even where they are not.

On Earth, Tetsuya is loved, watched, seen. On Earth, He is prince and nature His subject, the life all too eager to bow its head to His radiance and shine. Even as a child with His loud laughter and cries of joy, the earth bends beneath Him, welcoming Him, accepting Him, loving Him.

Tetsuya is a godling who grows up on warmth and affection, who knows things like his mother’s lullabies when she sings him to sleep in the clouds and the way the trees rustle ever so softly when he touches their trunks. The bark doesn’t hurt him; it doesn’t even scratch him.

Nothing does.

Nothing dares to.

 

When Tetsuya is older but not yet considered a teen, his mother notices how he wanders further from the meadow. He has curiosities in the forest beyond the flowers that bloom for his kisses, the sun that always shines its gentlest of rays. She follows at a distance, content to let him explore the world beyond what he knows. There is no force in the world that can ever harm him, as she has made them promise not to.

He finds new things in the forest, like moss and mushrooms, and even their decay stops just for a moment to let Tetsuya run his fingers through their skin and growth. There are times when his mother loses sight of him and worries, only to turn the corner and find him crouched next to the base of a tree, observing how the ants climb its trunk and bring back chunks of leaves to its home.

Tetsuya’s Gift is the gift of life, of love, of happiness and affection, of light. Firmly, His mother thinks, there is no one in the world who would harm Him. When even the rot and decay give way to His hands, Tetsuya is a beacon in the middle of a dark night.

(The other gods whisper among themselves and to her, wondering what Tetsuya’s future will be colored with. She waves them off with a laugh and a smile—it is still too early to think about things like marriage and love. Tetsuya will grow up in his own time; let her preserve his childhood for a little while longer.

Lest he be spirited away, like that goddess long ago with hair so red it rivaled the dawn.)

Sometimes Tetsuya wanders further into the forest, where the sun cannot shine through the thick canopy of leaves. The things that scurry along the dirt there shy away from Tetsuya’s barefooted steps, afraid of the light.

His touch brings life to dying plants, nourishes their seeds and roots and stems. In the next minute, they spring to life, the process of healing and growing accelerated by the quick touch of Tetsuya’s pale hands on their leaves.

At times like those, his mother looks at Tetsuya with a hint of awe.

Perhaps there will be nothing as kind as Tetsuya, not even nature itself.

 

It is when Tetsuya is barely a teenager that he first sees the signs of life fade completely from someone else’s eyes. His mother is not there to watch him, then, preoccupied with trying to _find_ him, first. He has left her in the meadow, where the flowers love him, where the sun kisses him, where the trees yearn for his closeness to them and grow envious without his attention.

The forest watches how his breath stills in finding the carcass of a deer, struggling in its last moments to stay alive. There is a wolf somewhere in the shadows, waiting for it to fall, and Tetsuya is too shocked to do anything but watch. In the next moment, the deer falls to the ground, dead, and Tetsuya watches how the wolf sinks its teeth into its skin and rips apart the body in a shower of red.

“Mother,” Tetsuya says later when she has found him, still standing there in the same spot he watched life leave. “How do I help something that is dead?”

She stops, then, as if she cannot comprehend the words that have come out of his mouth.

“You touch it, Tet-chan,” she says, gathering him in her arms. Tetsuya bends and folds easily in her hold, like he is nothing more than a child again, playing in the meadows. “The plants will always regrow when you do.”

“But that doesn’t work,” here, Tetsuya knits his brows and frowns, eyes looking down at his hands as if they have betrayed him. “I touched it, but it didn’t stand back up.”

“Stand back up?” she echoes, softly. Tetsuya rocks in her hold.

“The deer,” he says, as if that will answer everything. “The deer didn’t stand back up.”

 

The forest holds many other curiosities besides its foliage, and Tetsuya’s mother knows this. It is why she never lets him stray too far from her sight and pulls him back when he has gone deep enough, perhaps too deep before he can see something else. The deer is the beginning of it all, the first stain on Tetsuya’s otherwise perfect existence.

He has grown to be a beauty in his own right, hair like the bright blue sky and eyes like deep pools of water that will drown any suitor who seeks him. She fields requests from the other gods’ children to be his betrothed, his wife or husband, his eternal Other that will forever be by his side, next to his light, his love.

Tetsuya, however, has not taken his eyes away from the deeper parts of the forest where the impurities dwell, where life continues to elude him and his touch. She pulls him away the best that she can, but Tetsuya is no longer a child now. He pushes back.

“Please, Tet-chan, there is nothing in the forest to see,” she pleads, tugging at his kimono sleeves where the silk wraps around his frame lovingly, shimmering blue with silver leaves in an imitation of gold, because Tetsuya is not vain enough for gold. “You must stop going back there. You have to go to Court, soon. I should teach you before then.”

“There is something there,” Tetsuya insists, his eyes still looking elsewhere. There are the softness of his cheekbones that pull back as he frowns, the smoothness of his jaw hardening in the foreshadowing of a man. “ _Someone,_ there.”

“Someone?” his mother cries, almost hysterical. “Do not get caught in the flights of humans, Tetsuya, they bring nothing but heartache.”

“Not a human,” Tetsuya says, insists, like a pebble sinking ripples on a still lake, like it is the only thing that matters. “He’s not a human.”

“A creature?”

“No,” Tetsuya smiles, and it is warm like the smiles he used to have as a child. “He is a god, like us.”

Something akin to hope flutters in her heart, her worry fading into almost tranquil serenity. Here is Tetsuya, her son, finally finding interest in the other gods that surround him when he has been in love with nature his whole life.

“Tet-chan, don’t scare me like this,” she says softly, breathing a sigh of relief. “Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” Tetsuya replies. “Maybe. You saw him once.”

They speak no more of it that day.

 

She sees him leave into the forest again, behind the thick dressing of trees, where the sun cannot pierce the heavy layers of leaves overhead. She wants to pull him back, again, tug at his kimono sleeves like he is naught but a child playing too far from his mother, but she cannot do that any longer. Tetsuya resists, now, grown.

“Please come back safe,” she says to his back, and lets it carry on the wind into the forest ahead.

 

When She wakes up next, Tetsuya is gone, and no one hears from him again. Not the sun, nor the flowers, nor the trees.

Nature mourns its prince, and She mourns Her son.

 

**ii: though your tongue is bitter**

Akashi Seijuurou is only a child when his mother dies in a flurry of white lilies and drowned silk, her hair spread along the river stream where it tangles in the rocks; her blood washed with the water until she looks as if she is just sleeping there on the shore, lost in a dream. He doesn’t shed tears when he finds her body because gods do not cry, much less Akashi Seijuurou, so he only hefts her into the space of his gondola and moves them further down the river, to the other side.

When he deposits his mother into the stream of the Underworld, he does not mourn her, nor does he watch her body slowly sink into the dark depths of the water, never to be seen again. Gods do not die like humans do, with their weak bodies and weaker hearts.

_Do dead gods dream?_

At the end of it, he takes the oar in his hands and pushes the gondola forward, into the gates of his home where his father’s word is law. Akashi Seijuurou is only a child when he tells his father of his mother’s death, and his father tells him not to speak of it any more, to erase his mother from his mind.

Because Seijuurou is merciful, He allows her to die in oblivion. Better to be forgotten in the current than to be fished out, lost. His mother was a beautiful thing in the water, her smile obscured by the stream, so Seijuurou puts her where she is due: behind Him.

“Your mother was weak,” his father tells him atop his ash grey throne, overlooking the white expanse of the world down under, where the souls go to live again. When Seijuurou blinks, the snowflakes fall down from his lashes to his cheeks, like an imitation of the tears he cannot cry.

Seijuurou’s mother dies of heartbreak, an illness that Seijuurou swears never to fall victim to Himself.

 

It is always winter in Seijuurou’s home, the trees forever bare and groaning of the snow that weighs on its branches, pulling them further down to the ground. Seijuurou does not listen to their cries or pleas, not because he doesn’t care, but because there is nothing he can do to help them, and it is better to be left alone in suffering than to have a hand of fake sentimentality on their bark, caressing the ridges.

His father had slapped him once when he caught Seijuurou’s hand on a tree, and told him that gods of the Underworld should not care about those who are alive.

His father has been driven cold by the winter, his heart turned to ice, like everything else that grows (and doesn’t grow) here. Seijuurou is much the same, though he sees where the ice tries to bite his feet, his legs, and shatters them into a thousand sparkling crystals with one fell swoop of his oar. Perhaps his mother died from the sickness here, her heart too warm for a place such as this.

If he lets his father believe that the ice claims him like it does for his father, then He will surely let Seijuurou grow as he pleases, unknowingly unconstrained by the blizzards, unlike Him.

It’s a blessing in disguise, how the ice eats at his father. All Seijuurou has to do is wait.

Gods are good at waiting.

 

As a teenager, he finds a hole in the crevice of the World, a doorway that is surrounded by moss and overgrown greenery amidst the world of white behind him. It is so hidden in the mountain of snow that Seijuurou himself had a hard time picking out the pieces of dark foliage in a world where nothing lives. Life is alien to him.

This door, too, is a curiosity.

He has no doubt that his father knows it exists, as he knows everything that goes on in his realm, as he should. But Seijuurou is not a factor in an equation that his father can solve, not when Seijuurou knows how to elude his watchful eyes and go about his days with lies on his lips and his tongue. He has grown into an Underworld god fit to his father’s expectations.

Indeed, perhaps a little _too_ well.

Seijuurou brushes aside the leaves and steps his hard leather boots on dry dirt for the first time, leaving his oar behind in the bushes as he ventures out into the living world. The plants move back into place behind him, obscuring the entrance to the Underworld as if it never existed. Seijuurou ignores them to continue on.

The forest here is dry of snow, covered instead in a layer of green moss and spots of light that barely filter onto the forest floor through the thick canopy of leaves. Seijuurou reaches a hand into the spots of sunlight and feels how the rays warm his skin through the black sleeve of his coat. A quartet of birds chirp in the distance, followed by their more predatory counterparts. Even if Seijuurou has never stepped foot outside the Underworld until now, he knows of Earth and its inhabitants.

The dead dream of it too much.

He wanders forward, deeper into the forest, catching glances of the ecosystem that thrives alive and well here. The leaves crunch beneath his boots, and for a while there is nothing but the sound of his steps on the forest floor, cracking branches and twigs along the way. As he comes across a stream, he stops.

When Akashi Seijuurou first meets Kuroko Tetsuya, it is on a chilly autumn day where the leaves are brown and red and scattered along his feet, dead and dying like the world he comes from. In Tetsuya’s hands are the remnants of a chick that fell too far from its nest, also dead, its carcass refusing to rot in his hands. When Tetsuya presses his fingers into the broken pieces of the dead bird, the bones fix, but the bird doesn’t chirp.

“What are you trying to do?” he asks from across the stream, and Tetsuya looks up, startled, hiding the bird behind his back like it is a dirty secret meant to be kept. “What’s dead is dead.”

“It’s nothing,” Tetsuya says, eyes darting immediately to the ground. “I was curious.”

“About death?” Seijuurou pursues. “There is nothing interesting in how things die. They just do.”

“That’s not right,” Tetsuya replies, chin tilting just enough upwards to stare at Seijuurou through his lashes. His hands return to his front, though he cradles the chick in one hand and prods at it with his other—gently, so gently, as if afraid to harm the carcass of something so insignificant. “I don’t understand it, so I find it interesting.”

“Do you?” Seijuurou asks, his eyes hardening. Here is a god who has seen nothing but the beauty of life and spring, and has never stepped foot inside the harsh winters of the Underworld, covered in white, white, and white. “Do you seek to defile the dead as you do, then?”

Tetsuya falls silent, the words effectively chastising him in this forest of nothing but the two of them. Seijuurou finds he quite likes the abashed look on the other god’s face, the way his blue eyes cloud over in something akin to shame, how his pale hands shake and shake.

“I’m sorry, you are right,” Tetsuya says in the end, after a long period of silence. He bends down to deposit the bird into a bed of leaves. Out of his hands, the bird rolls over, limp, succumbing to the decay and rot that infests the forest floor.

Seijuurou does not say anything, for a while. Neither does Tetsuya.

“What is your name?” asks Tetsuya, curious eyes resting on Seijuurou’s frame, the black of his cape, the black of his clothes. It is nothing like Tetsuya’s snow-white kimono, thrown over layers and layers of white and red. “I am Kuroko Tetsuya, of the Upper Courts.”

Ironic, Seijuurou thinks, that death meets life in such a way.

“My name is Akashi Seijuurou,” he responds after a pause. “I am a god of the Underworld.”

“The Underworld?” something in Tetsuya’s eyes shine, spark, and Seijuurou finds himself captivated in their light. It is a hue of blue that is colored like the bright sky, deep enough for mortal men to drown in like the stream between them.

Seijuurou is not a mortal man. He does not walk their mortal steps. But something brews behind his pupils then, like a nefarious plan hatched in that moment of realization, of captivation, fascination—Seijuurou knows how these stories go, when Life meets Death, and it does not end well for Tetsuya. After all, the souls he carries across the river all tell the same tale, only in different variations.

Whether Kuroko Tetsuya is a god or a mortal makes no difference. Perhaps it is _because_ Tetsuya is a god that makes it all the more interesting.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” Tetsuya asks, hopeful, eyes shining and feet shuffling forward towards the edge of the stream; it is the only line that separates them from each other, and even then it is shallow enough for them to cross with no difficulty.

Seijuurou keeps his distance for now, lets an amused smile play at the edge of his lips. Tetsuya’s eyes are drawn there.

“Will _you?”_ he deflects as easily as the water runs down the rocks between them. He thinks about his mother’s body splayed here, like he found her all those years ago, her hair thrown over the rocks. She had worn white like Tetsuya does now, the same layered kimonos that the gods of the Upper Courts wear.

He thinks about Tetsuya splayed there like his mother.

“I will,” Tetsuya is eager, and he smiles at Seijuurou like He is the only being in the world, the only one who can sate his unfathomable curiosity. “The same time, here, tomorrow.”

Seijuurou watches Tetsuya gather the ends of his kimono and walk back to the forest entrance, towards the sunlight and the meadows, away from the darker ends of Seijuurou’s dwelling.

He watches Tetsuya until Tetsuya disappears into the shadows of the trees, and even then Seijuurou still stands by the stream.

 

Tetsuya is a curious little thing that asks Seijuurou many questions about the Underworld and how it works, how death travels, how death deals. They sit across from each other on their meeting days, on opposite ends of the stream, a courtesy to them both that reminds them of how different their worlds are. Neither of them cross it.

Neither of them are _afraid_ to cross it, either.

Seijuurou finds it almost poetic how enamored Tetsuya is with death and its business, when his touch springs life into the driest of plants, fixes and mends bones that would be broken. Seijuurou finds it sad because of how easily Tetsuya is ensnared by him, by his presence, by the mystery that surrounds the Underworld and all who inhabit it.

Seijuurou leads him on, like dangling a carrot in front of a rabbit and Tetsuya follows, unbidden, unknowing, into his trap.

“Have you killed anyone before?” Tetsuya asks one day, innocent blue eyes blinking in curiosity, in wonder and awe.

“My mother,” Seijuurou answers, half-lie and half-truth, bundled behind a thick facade of indifference. He knows what it is that killed his mother, and it was not him. Perhaps those of the Upper Courts are never fit to live in the Underworld. “She died of heartbreak.”

“Oh,” and Tetsuya deflates, expression shameful. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring Akashi-kun’s past up.”

The way he shies back and looks away from Seijuurou’s eyes, abashed, ashamed—it excites his blood, burns through his veins. Tetsuya is a beauty from the Upper Courts, favored by many, loved by all, and this is something Seijuurou knows because his mother was the same way, before she was pulled from the clouds to marry his father in the dead, dead Underworld.

Seijuurou offers his hand across the stream, arm outstretched.

“What are you apologizing for, Tetsuya?” Seijuurou asks, and he likes how the syllables of Tetsuya’s name play on his tongue. “I do not regret her death. Nor should you, for someone you have never met.”

“That is true, but I feel I have offended,” Tetsuya raises his eyes to meet Seijuurou’s hand, open in invitation. For a moment, Seijuurou sees something flash behind his eyes, something that doesn’t belong to someone who lives in the Upper Courts, but it is gone as soon as it came.

What was that ice, colder than the Underworld? The snow that could bury a man alive.

Tetsuya is many things: reticent, mostly; mystery is the least of them.

(So Seijuurou falls, unknowingly constrained by the blizzards. If there is a glass case with which to put Tetsuya behind, it is in the snowfall of the Underworld, where the vision of the Upper Courts will only be a dream within a dream.)

 

When Seijuurou finally nears adulthood, his father dies. The ice had eaten him, mostly, and that is what Seijuurou parrots to the Upper Courts when he rises to meet them. They believe him, even if they don’t, because those of the Upper Courts never want to dirty their hands in the stillness and death of the Underworld. If Seijuurou were cruel, he would ask them to send gods down to inspect his home, to live there and verify his claims.

Because Seijuurou is merciful, he only has eyes on one god, tucked away in the shadows of the pillars, held onto by his mother who presses hard fingers against the silk of his kimono, like drawing him back from a cruel storm.

But Seijuurou is merciful.

He smiles in the light cast down on his form, bows his head in facade to receive his golden crown, and leaves in a flurry of black velvet that shines and shimmers beneath the lights. No longer is he _a_ god of the Underworld, but _the_ god of the Underworld. The laurel rests, figuratively and literally, on his head.

Tetsuya stares at him all the way down the hall when he leaves, as if wanting to say something before Seijuurou disappears into the winter again, as if wanting to reach out and catch Seijuurou’s cape with his hands.

 _Take me with you,_ Seijuurou thinks he hears, but Tetsuya has not opened his mouth. _I cannot imagine living without you._

Seijuurou hears them in his mind, like delusions, like sweet lullabies for a spring day.

Death loves life in all its forms.

Tetsuya will follow, soon enough, with a touch of Seijuurou’s fingers, his mouth, his lips.

Gods of the Upper Courts are easy to tempt when given things they cannot have.

 

“I am betrothed,” Tetsuya says on their next (and last) meeting and it is behind his haven of silk, behind the floral designs of his kimono sleeves. There is no sadness or sorrow in Tetsuya’s frame or his being, just a note of shame weaved in it all like gold embroidery on black fabric. “My mother has arranged for my marriage. I will become part of the Courts soon, and then I can no longer meet you here.”

It is an outcome that Seijuurou expected, and yet.

“You don’t sound happy, Tetsuya,” Seijuurou says, across the stream like always. Neither of them have dared to cross it still. “Marriage between gods is not something to be taken lightly.”

“I am not,” Tetsuya says, a little heated, a little defensive. Like all anger, though, Tetsuya cannot hold onto it, and it dissipates like the bird’s corpse he first found in Tetsuya’s hands. “I have come to tell Akashi-kun because this might be our last meeting. I wanted to see you one last time.”

“You are sentimental for me,” Seijuurou observes, perhaps with a note of satisfaction. His eyes gleam, though his posture remains still. “Then, let me propose an offer.”

“An offer?” Tetsuya raises his head in confusion. “What offer?”

Seijuurou extends his hand again, arm outstretched. “You can marry me, instead.”

Tetsuya opens his mouth to protest—Seijuurou can already see the words forming behind his eyes, in his throat, in his hands that reach out to Seijuurou only to push him back—but it’s like the words freeze in his throat, dead.

Normally, anyone who keeps Seijuurou waiting suffers his impatience, hesitation punished when it could lead to betrayal, but Tetsuya is special. Tetsuya is always forgiven.

“I…” Tetsuya manages to say, the words still caught in his throat. Seijuurou is patient (always patient, only for him) and does not push. “I can’t.”

“Can’t you?” Seijuurou deflects again, like their first meeting across the way. “Or won’t you?”

“It is not like Akashi-kun’s kindness is being spurned,” here, Tetsuya finally looks up through his eyelashes—blue, blue, and blue, blinking blue. Seijuurou wants to encase it, if only so he can keep it forever. “But I can’t. It would be disrespectful to my mother and my betrothed.”

Seijuurou doesn’t talk, only waits, like a predator stalking his prey, like a wolf hunting its next deer. There is an art to this, a patience.

“You’re right, of course, it would be,” Seijuurou smiles, and Tetsuya’s eyes are drawn to his mouth again, to the sharp spark canines that flash only briefly when it catches the sunlight. “But are you content like this?”

“Like what?” Tetsuya oozes fear, apprehension—confusion, _hope—_ and Seijuurou feels it prick at his skin, excited.

Seijuurou takes his first step into the stream, the water rushing beneath his feet.

“To be dictated in life by someone who is not yourself,” Seijuurou says, quick. “To spend the rest of your days in the Upper Courts not allowed to roam Earth again. Are you satisfied? Are you content? Do you wish to be a trophy of someone else’s cabinet?”

Tetsuya does not move, frozen.

Seijuurou steps forward again, wading deeper, balancing on the rocks between them. His cape spreads wide on the water, like a halo of black wings in the bright sky. Tetsuya watches, careful, but he doesn’t move.

“Akashi-kun…” it’s whispered, like a prayer, like acceptance, like love. Seijuurou does not imagine these words because he could not hope to ever capture the way they wash over his frame, send pleasant shivers down his spine. Testuya is special; Tetsuya always exceeds his expectations. “Akashi-kun, don’t cross the stream.”

“Tell me, Tetsuya,” Seijuurou continues as if Tetsuya never spoke, as if he is the law and Tetsuya his vassal. He takes more steps into the stream.

“Akashi-kun.”

Seijuurou is knee-deep in the water, aware of how the current rushes by his clothes and kisses the skin underneath. Tetsuya watches him, transfixed, from the shore, as if there is an anchor holding him in place on that patch of dirt. Seijuurou tugs at it, the anchor—he reaches out and grabs Tetsuya by his kimono sleeves and drags him into the stream.

There is a splash as Tetsuya’s geta stumble into the river and his kimono is stained with water. Seijuurou catches him, always, gathers Tetsuya in his arms like a long forgotten lover and Tetsuya desperately clings to him as to not be washed away, as to not drown.

“Are you happy, Tetsuya?” Seijuurou asks in the roar of the water that rushes by them, between them, through them.

There is silence.

“That is…” Tetsuya stutters, the red rising to his cheeks and down his neck, where Seijuurou’s fingers lay, still, on his skin. Like this, it’s as if Tetsuya will fade into the water as easily as he fades into the shadows of the trees, if Seijuurou is not there to hold him. “It’s…”

“The Underworld is a beautiful place,” Seijuurou says, lifting Tetsuya’s chin up with a finger until he has no choice but to stare into Seijuurou’s eyes. “You’ll be able to see the Earth.”

Tetsuya’s lip quivers, half-open, half-deciding, like the water that jumps when it hits a stone too quickly. Seijuurou can feel how Tetsuya’s fingers tighten on his clothes, presses closer to his cape, and yet his mouth remains still. Half-open or half-closed, Seijuurou has no need for distinctions when all he needs is Tetsuya’s answer.

The water is cold against their clothes. Tetsuya’s silk, perhaps, more so than Seijuurou’s black wool.

He will need warmer clothes when he descends into the Underworld.

“You can decide tomorrow,” says Seijuurou, slowly, tracing the path of humanlike veins on Tetsuya’s neck with his fingers. His breath exhales in cold puffs of air on Tetsuya’s chin. “If you come here again, then we will wed.”

“Akashi-kun,” is all Tetsuya says. He inhales, sharply, through his mouth, and then grips Seijuurou’s cape tighter. “Akashi-kun, if I asked you to, would you kiss me?”

Seijuurou leans forward and Tetsuya meets him halfway, standing on his toes in his geta as the water rushes by their feet. Seijuurou kisses like savoring wine: slow, almost sweet—he presses Tetsuya closer and runs his tongue along Tetsuya’s lips, mouth, teeth and tongue. Tetsuya only folds into him, pliant, malleable, eager, gasping breaths and quiet moans into the back of Seijuurou’s mouth.

They pull apart and then kiss again, and again, and again. Seijuurou is addicted to the taste, to the sounds. Tetsuya’s nails rake lines down the velvet of his cape and his chest heaves in breaths against Seijuurou’s hands. A kiss for curiosity, a kiss for taste, a kiss for desperation.

A kiss for goodbyes.

(A kiss for defilement.)

When Seijuurou finally pulls back, Tetsuya’s face is flushed a deep red, his lips swollen and eyes glossy, like he has lost a part of himself in the roof of Seijuurou’s mouth, the tip of Seijuurou’s tongue.

“Come back, tomorrow,” Seijuurou says, holding Tetsuya’s cheeks in his hands and smiling a grin made of teeth. “Come back if you will marry me.”

He leaves Tetsuya there, in the stream, dragging water through the forest as he makes his way back to the cold, cold Underworld, where the ice will try to eat at his legs through the soaked fabric of his pants and boots.

The ice, Seijuurou thinks, like Tetsuya’s eyes, the hidden frost beneath those pupils made for the sky.

Seijuurou closes his eyes and licks his lips; he savors the taste of Tetsuya’s defilement.

Tomorrow, tomorrow.

(He readies a feast.)

 

**iii: devour all, devour all**

The seasons change as they always do on Earth, but Tetsuya is never allowed to spend even a second in its winter, the cold too harsh. Autumn is the closest he is ever allowed to get to the cold, the death, the frightening stillness in a world blanketed by white. In spring, he can see the remnants of snow melting in the sun, feeding the seeds of new flowers underneath; they sprout where the snow dies.

The gods of the Upper Courts lead sheltered lives, most of them away from Earth and its impurities. The playground of meadows Tetsuya used to play in as a child is a chance only select few experience, the rest living most if not all of their life above the clouds. Someone like him is not supposed to see the misery and beauty of death, like a muted orchestra that keeps playing despite its silence.

Perhaps his mother saw something in that, in the way the violinist pulls her bow along the strings and feels the wood of the instrument reverberate in her hands. It’s beautiful, in its own way, the juxtaposition of silence and passion.

Of death and life.

His lips still burn from the memory of their kiss, his cheeks reddening at the thought of remembering it again. There is a touch of satisfaction amidst it all, like praise for a job well done. Tetsuya tucks the feeling in his kimono sleeves when he steps out of the stream, the water running down his calves in rivulets and dripping puddles onto the forest floor.

The trees seem to still, when he starts walking among them again. The sun sets in the distance, bright enough to lead Tetsuya home, but he does not fear getting lost. When he was a child, he walked these paths from sun up to sundown, until his mother came to drag him away from the darker corners of the forest.

In the end, it was a wasted effort. Tetsuya had already fallen into the temptation of the unknown, and no amount of divinity could ever hope to change him again.

The forest understands, despite its silence. It parts a path for him to reach the meadows again where his mother waits with her worried face and worried eyes, eager to take him home. Tetsuya is no longer a child, but he lets her worry. She pleads with him not to go back, so he smiles and tells her he’ll be careful.

The forest understands, despite its sorrow. When the sun rises next, Kuroko Tetsuya slips between the shadows of the trees and makes his way further into the thicket again like he has a thousand times before. Somewhere, a raven croons, like murmured hushes of goodbyes.

 _Yes,_ Tetsuya thinks. _Goodbye._

 

Akashi Seijuurou is a proud god, as all gods are, though comparing him to the shortsighted hedonists of the Upper Courts would be a disservice. He is leaps and bounds beyond them, _all_ of them, including Tetsuya himself.

But there is one thing that Akashi Seijuurou does not know.

Tetsuya was born in light and divinity, all the world’s existence promised to never hurt him. Bark does not scratch him, steel will not pierce him, and even the sun will not warm him, too scared of leaving burns on his pale skin. It was an arrangement his mother made with Nature when he was still in her womb, and when she gave birth to him he came out a silent child.

It is cruel if he thinks about it; Tetsuya will never know pain as well as he knows life that is afraid to be near him, scared of hurting him. Even to emotional pain, Tetsuya feels almost apathetic, hollow in the way his mother cries for him not to go into the forest again.

It is her own downfall, as well as His.

He became enamored with death, the process of decay and rot, the thought that all life would have to end some day. Whether it is within a set amount of time as it is for a human or inevitably in the future as it is for a god, all things will end just as certain as the sun will set. The cycle starts and begins anew, only Tetsuya, removed, can only watch.

Akashi Seijuurou thinks he has ensnared Tetsuya in a rabbit trap when they meet next, pulling the metaphorical string from under his bait and watching as the cage slams shut behind the _click-clack_ of Tetsuya’s geta when he crosses the stream into Seijuurou’s waiting arms.

In a way, he has. Tetsuya will not deny him that.

But Tetsuya saw the cage from eons away and willingly tripped the switch himself.

He loves death in all its forms, its beauty. In the same way, Tetsuya loves Seijuurou for what he is, what he represents. Death is something he will never have.

Seijuurou is something he can.

 

The Upper Courts taught him two things: one, how to lie.

The gods there flaunt their radiance to the clouds, lord their deistic essence over the mortals that live on Earth like they are above their petty squabbles and grabs for power. Tetsuya has never understood it, that need to be better or higher than anyone else, but he has also never questioned it. He merely watches, a spectator in their politics.

They deceive at every turn; even the celestial homeland is not safe from disputes and shows of power. After all, man was created in their image, and their hubris stems from them. There is more alike between a man and a god than they would ever like to admit.

(The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes why his mother took him down to Earth unlike the rest of the divine children. But that was also a mistake, and Tetsuya wonders what life he would have led if he never saw that deer in the forest, devoured alive.)

“I am betrothed,” he lies to Seijuurou, plays and acts the part of a boy concerned about a future without his childhood playmate. “My mother has arranged for my marriage. I will become part of the Courts soon, and then I can no longer meet you here.”

Tetsuya merely gave him the key. It is Seijuurou who chose to open the door for him.

 

Seijuurou prepares a grandiose feast on the night of their wedding, a veritable litany of dishes that span the entire table, from steamed buns to braised duck to seaweed salads, all arranged artfully in twelve different sections. Tetsuya knows what this means even if Seijuurou thinks he doesn’t—a dish for each month, each day, and if Tetsuya should ingest the food of the Underworld then he will never be able to leave it.

For a moment, he hesitates, wondering for all the world if he is willing to chase so far after his dreams, obsessions, _Seijuurou_.

Seijuurou smiles at him like he has planned this all along and Tetsuya thinks _yes, he has_. Their wedding had been naught but a small ceremony of Seijuurou as both the priest and the groom, and the only audience of their matrimony was the silence of the trees, mourning. Tetsuya had drank the offered sake dish and almost spluttered as the alcohol burned down his throat, like the last traces of innocence all filtered through the fire that churns in his blood and his stomach.

“We should start,” Seijuurou says, already reaching for a dish though lacking Tetsuya’s input, like his word is law, here. It is. “With the soup. It’s cold. Daikon for a healthy body.”

Gods do not need sustenance like humans do, but eating is a pleasure which most gods enjoy wholeheartedly. Tetsuya is no different.

He sees the spoon dip under the powder white broth with perfectly cut chunks of daikon floating near the surface. Seijuurou pulls him close, flush like a lover, an arm that is tight around his waist like a chain. Tetsuya could leave, if he wanted to. Tetsuya could run away, if he wanted to.

There is nothing in the world that can hurt him, not even Akashi Seijuurou himself.

He opens his mouth, instead, and lets Seijuurou feed him the liquid of the soup, and it slides down his throat more pleasant than the sake.

Daikon, for January.

“Do you like it, Tetsuya?” Seijuurou asks, fingers on Tetsuya’s neck, touching but _not_ all at once. They are feather-light, like they aren’t there, like the snow that falls around them.

Tetsuya has never seen falling snow before.

“Yes,” he replies, simply, smiling. One month of many is nothing to worry about, Tetsuya thinks, if he wants to back out now.

He doesn’t.

“Then, try the renkon next.”

Renkon, for February. Bamboo shoots, for March. April. May. June.

Seijuurou explains dish after dish as he feeds them all to Tetsuya, who opens his mouth to chew and swallow without a word. The months, they slide down his throat like the food does, all gone and tucked away in the mountains of snow in the Underworld.

Ayu, for July. Unagi, for August. September. October. November.

“Have you had pomegranates before?” Seijuurou asks when the table is nearly empty and Tetsuya feels the fatigue of eating.

“No, he says, blinking. “It doesn’t exist in the Upper Courts.”

“It’s good, Tetsuya,” Seijuurou says, eyes flickering with a shade of heat that is supposed to burn Tetsuya whole, sear through his insides and leave him with burning cheeks that flush red, stark against the white around them.

Tetsuya looks at the last fruit on the table, cracked open with rows of red seeds not unlike the color of Seijuurou’s hair, his eyes.

He smiles, instead.

“I will take Seijuurou-san’s word for it.”

Pomegranates, for December.

He can never leave the Underworld now, bound by the food that resides in his stomach and disperses into his veins.

(But that’s fine, isn’t it, Tetsuya thinks. This is what he wanted all along.)

 

Seijuurou is not a slow lover, but he drags Tetsuya’s pleasure through a finely flattened paper press as easily as he drags his nails along the expanse of Tetsuya’s skin, his waist, his thighs. Even then, Seijuurou’s nails do not hurt, but Tetsuya feels their ghostlike touches digging deep into the very essence of his being, drawing everything that makes Tetsuya a god out of his flushed skin, his heavy breathing. Seijuurou leans down to whisper words into his flesh, kiss along his jaw and capture his mouth, and Tetsuya merely wraps his arms around Seijuurou’s neck and bares himself, _all of himself._

Their wedding is a lonely thing, the Underworld quiet, none of Seijuurou’s subordinates to even greet Tetsuya as he walks over the threshold of the palace. Perhaps that is how Seijuurou prefers it; Tetsuya is a being with which only He should look upon.

How does he look now, Tetsuya wonders, the many layers of his kimono spread beneath him like a futon, his face flushed and gasping as Seijuurou leans over him, his eyes glossy and lost in the building heat of his abdomen. It pools there, like the liquid that stains his thighs, his tongue.

 _“Tetsuya,”_ Seijuurou breathes into the cracks of Tetsuya’s mouth, and the breath there mists over his chin, down the column of his throat, like the soft caress of a lover when both of Seijuurou’s hands are digging purple into his hips.

Tetsuya does not feel the pain then either, too lost in his divinity, too lost in this pleasure.

Here he is, the Life tainted by Death, carried away into the Underworld to never leave it again.

Though Tetsuya is never unwilling, never dragged. It is He who chases the coattails of Seijuurou’s black cape as it drags through the forest floor, like chasing the anomaly of a white rabbit through a hole, falling down into a new world.

He falls, too quickly, too willingly, into the lines of Seijuurou’s mouth, the way his name is whispered in the darkness of their room, like Tetsuya is a trophy in Seijuurou’s cabinet, locked away from the light of day.

 

Tetsuya is easy to tempt when given things he cannot have.

 

There is a saying about a god that falls from grace, lured by human desires and tainted as they hit the ground. Tetsuya doesn't remember what the saying was, or what it entailed, but the gods of the Upper Courts spoke of it sometimes when he passed them by, silent as a ghost that drifts through the pavilions of the celestial palace. Only the jade bells on his feet ever speak of his presence.

_There is no afterlife for a god._

Tetsuya’s feet ache when he walks in his geta, and it is the only pain he will ever know—only his own body can ever hurt him, not the hard slabs of wood he stands on. It was a reason why Tetsuya kept going into the forest, walking from sun up to sundown until his feet finally gave way to pain and the skin of his heels began to turn red. _Click-clack, click-clack._

The Underworld is as vast as the forest he used to walk, though cold, now, and filled with snow. Tetsuya slips where he climbs uphill but the trees here catch him. The ground is soft if he ever falls over. Even the Underworld, with its secrets, its isolation, loves Life, loves _Tetsuya._ Perhaps that is why Seijuurou loves him, too, though his love is different from that of the World’s.

Tetsuya continues to walk until his feet hurt.

Here in this forest of bare trees, he can get lost in the snow that shows no prints of his previous steps. He used to think it was alright to wander as long as his mother was there to watch him, pull him away when he went too far. His mother is not here to watch him now, but Tetsuya feels the smouldering gaze of Seijuurou’s eyes on his back wherever he goes. The Underworld is his domain, and Seijuurou knows all that happens within it.

“Did you enjoy yourself, Tetsuya?” Seijuurou asks when Tetsuya comes home from his walks, his feet rubbed raw.

“Yes, Seijuurou-san,” he says, smiling, marveling at the winter he never got to see as a child. “Thank you.”

Later, it is their breaths in the darkness of their room, Seijuurou’s hands pushing hard against Tetsuya’s flesh until he can leave marks and Tetsuya wishing he could feel the pain that Seijuurou’s nails make when they dig into the skin of his thighs.

The pleasure, though—it remains.

The other thing the Upper Courts taught him: how to fall into sin, to ambitions.

Gods are not so different from humans after all.

 

Seijuurou’s mother, when Tetsuya asks him, died of heartbreak. Her heart stopped beating, frozen over by the cold of the Underworld.

A god of the Upper Courts is never meant to live in the Underworld.

(“But you, Tetsuya,” Seijuurou says when he draws constellations across the expanse Tetsuya’s skin, digs his nails into the marks he’s made on Tetsuya’s neck. “You _are_.”)

Tetsuya wades into the lifestream of the Underworld, the water that's filled with a thousand regrets. The dead here are loud where the others are silent, scurrying away from Tetsuya’s Life as much as they yearn for it, screaming garbled profanities into the abyss. The water soaks through the whites of his kimono and licks at the skin of his thighs, where Seijuurou’s fingers were just before, where Seijuurou’s come slides down the back of his knees, covered barely by the sheer silk.

He wades deeper, until the water hits his chest. Tetsuya moves his hands out of the stream and watches the water fall between his fingers, each drop a different soul that longs to cling to his frame. The dead are the only other thing that can touch him—the dead cannot make pacts with gods, with his mother.

_Join me._

Tetsuya cannot die, this is fact. The lifestream runs between his legs and tries to drag him under by the silk of his kimonos but he stays tethered to the surface, afloat. Any other god would be dragged under, to face a death that is supposed to be eons away, not even a footnote in the centuries they will live.

When Akashi Seijuurou found his mother here on the rocks all those years ago, she had not died of heartbreak, as gods usually do. The lifestream does not drag Seijuurou like it dragged his mother; his very essence is tied to it, the flow. The dead that wander about on the other side of the river waiting to be ferried over all know what lies beyond the depths of these waters. It is ironic that Seijuurou does not, but that is the beauty in itself.

Tetsuya plunges headfirst into the stream, the kimono clinging to his skin, and the souls that inhabit the water swirl around him like bioluminescent lights as he breathes there, in the undertow, letting the currents caress every bit of his skin as it passes by him.

Akashi Seijuurou’s mother died of Herself, of Her grief for Her son, never able to grow up in the beauty of the World above like Her, forever caught in the endless winter of the Underworld. By birthright, Seijuurou would have commanded the heavens.

Tetsuya closes his eyes, and listens.

The lifestream that flows through the Underworld is the essence of a dead god, beyond Seijuurou’s mother, beyond the gods who died before.

It is the essence that his mother begged for when she promised the whole world to not hurt him.

_Do dead gods dream?_

 

(Does Seijuurou know, Tetsuya wonders, that he could belong in the heavens when it is Tetsuya who is supposed to be bound to the Underworld, forever.

At the end of the cycle, Life becomes Death, and Death becomes Life, renewed again.)

 

 

 

_Yes, Tetsuya dreams._

**Author's Note:**

> DJFHSDF I'M SORRY FOR WHAT I JUST WROTE AAAA  
> HAPPY WHITE DAY!!!
> 
> please leave a comment and dry my tears from writing this  
> [catch me on twitter!](https://twitter.com/octomaidly)


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